Chapter Text
This is a story about shame. Shame is not guilt, which can be productive, is not the result of a desire to be better, is not something which can be learned from, can prompt one to grow. Shame is only this: a rot. Shame is something thrust upon children at an early age, that eats away at the heart of them until it twists them, piece by piece, into a cage around themselves. Shame comes from the outside. Shame comes from the opinions of those who matter most to a person, the things they say and the things they leave unsaid.
Fareeha knows shame, knows it well, knows the feeling of it like oil on her skin, the way it clings to her. Try as she might she can never quite wash it all off.
(She does try. On the worst of days, when she feels her failures most acutely, she stands in the shower for an hour or more, hot water beating down on her like she could burn it all off, be as pure and clean as the new skin underneath the old the water carries away. No one else will see it, the redness, the rawness, but she feels it nonetheless. She aches with it, and still shame is oily on her skin.)
On her worst days, she feels it follows her, that shame, a miasma she breathes in constantly. In, a feeling of inadequacy, of never quite living up to others’ expectations of her, of her family legacy, and out, the knowledge that she is letting others down, that failure, from her, means death, the stone cold certainty that her mother would have done better, in her place, would have saved more people. The oil coats her lungs until she struggles to breathe.
For many people, shame is a societal thing, is ingrained in them by the movies they watch and the cultural norms they absorb, is instilled in them by a thousand different little comments people make to them, over the years, judgment for this, rejection for that. Certainly, Fareeha has absorbed some of that shame—it would be practically impossible not to, living as a woman in the world—but she knows that the majority of her feelings of inadequacy come from one place: her mother.
It is not all, of course, Ana’s fault. A fair portion of it is decidedly not her mother’s responsibility, grew from seeds which were planted long before Ana’s rejection of her, but even that traces back.
Shame began, for Fareeha, with pride. As a child, she was bursting with it—not for herself, but for her mother’s accomplishments. Her mother, the soldier, her mother, the hero, her mother, the savior. It made her chest swell and her heart nearly burst. Her mother was the sun she orbited, from which she absorbed all heat and light. At the time, she could not imagine that it would ever be a bad thing, to be so proud of her mother, could never imagine that it would cause her any pain.
How could it? Her mother was perfect, shining, golden.
But therein lay the problem—Fareeha could never be the same. As much as she wanted to be, she could not become her mother, could not be held to the same standards, could not achieve the same things. Always, she tried, inspired by her mother’s accomplishments and desperate to uphold her legacy, and always, she came up just short.
(Or, not always, but the things Fareeha was better at never seemed quite so important. If she was better at fishing, who would notice? If her grades in school were higher, who would care? Not her, and not her mother, either. Always, Ana’s observations of the differences between them fell just short of praise. To Fareeha, that felt damning, an acknowledgment that she was not the copy of her mother she wanted to be, after all. To be herself felt like a failure.)
This started as frustration, as disappointment, as a desire to do and to be more, and it might have stayed there, had things between she and her mother not taken such a turn. To not live up to one’s goals can smart, but it rarely clings to a person the way shame does. It is possible that, in another life, Fareeha might simply have shrugged off these setbacks, or even learned from them, might have realized that she could be her own person, independent of her mother. It is possible that they would still sting, into her adulthood, but still not define her, not like they have.
It is possible but it is not what is.
Instead, Ana rejected her, and in the harshest of ways, determined that Fareeha, for all that she had accomplished, was not worthy of joining her, at Overwatch, would not serve the organization well. She denied Fareeha the place she had worked her entire life to earn, and in so doing taught her that her differences made her lesser than.
Perhaps this was not her intent. Perhaps her intent was only that Fareeha live a little longer, have a bit more experience, before committing her life to such a thing, perhaps her intent was to protect Fareeha, so that she should never face the dangers of a battlefield, perhaps her intent was that Fareeha be shielded from the pain she had experienced, in her time in Overwatch, the gradual unmaking she was undergoing even then, but she did not communicate any of this to her daughter. All she said was It’s not your place, and all Fareeha felt was You are not worthy.
She internalized it, that message of unworthiness, carried it with her in the years to come. She wanted, desperately, to prove her mother wrong, to show that she, too, could be worthy of their family legacy, could be someone worth looking up to, and did everything she could to prove it—in spite of her mother, now, and not inspired by her. When Ana bade her not to enlist, all but ordered her to stay at home, said that if Fareeha walked out the door, they would not speak again, Fareeha went gladly, thought that, in her position, it was what her mother would do.
(To that, there was some truth. Years earlier, her mother had enlisted in spite of her grandmother’s objections that to do such a thing was unwomanly, would render her unloveable. Over the years, Fareeha saw how that accusation still dogged her mother, watched Ana assert, time and time again, that she was a woman, was feminine, even if she worked in a man’s world. It had confused her, once, how long her mother clung on to that pain; as an adult, she came to understand.)
Leaving did not help. Her mother was a living legend, among their military, and to everyone she met, Fareeha was Ana’s daughter, or another Amari, and not herself. Always, she was a shadow of someone else. It made her keenly aware of all the ways in which she did not quite measure up, all the times a person told her, your mother would never have or if Captain Amari were here. Even when Fareeha achieved a captain’s rank all her own, it was not sufficient to distance her. Always, she was the other Captain Amari.
Briefly, she considered taking her father’s last name, but she knew that to do so would be to admit defeat, to acknowledge that she would never be her mother, and Ana would not run from a challenge like that, would face it head on.
Or, so Fareeha thought.
The reality of things, that her mother was fallible, that her mother was hurting, that her mother, too, could not live up to the expectations heaped upon her, did little to soothe Fareeha. In some ways, it made her life harder, because others saw her mother as a martyr, and who could live up to that?
(That her mother lived, she kept secret, as she had been bidden. That, too, ate at her, the secrecy, for such was not in her nature, and she resented Ana for it, resented that she was seen as perfect, as someone who died for her cause, when in reality she had abandoned everyone. Strangers told Fareeha how sorry they were for her loss, and she was never free to say we had not spoken in years, let alone the truth, that her mother was alive, and if she voiced her frustration, even once, then she was not being a good daughter, was not respecting the memory of her mother. People saw her anger and they thought less of her for it, thought her mother would have had the grace to forgive. Little did they know, but still, Fareeha felt it, that shame.)
Shame followed her, and followed her, and followed her, through the military, into Helix, and all the way on to the Recall, where it lives with her still.
In the early days, it was different, being among people who had known her mother before her death. The shame took on a different form, because now she was not failing to live up to some impossible ideal, but was instead not acting like the memories of a very real woman. None among them thought Ana perfect—at least not among the old guard—but still, they could not help but notice all the ways in which Fareeha was different from her mother, all the little things about her that did not measure up. If your mother were here, one of them would say, or Ana would have, as if it mattered, as if Fareeha did not feel acutely enough already the gulf between the woman Ana was, in their eyes, and the leader she herself was becoming.
Every time she has failed, in her career, she has thought of her mother. Every death under her command has weighed on her, and she has wondered—would Ana have done better? Her reputation as a guardian, as her squad’s Mama Bear was well earned, the fatality rates among her people low. Regardless of Fareeha’s personal feelings, and even stripping away the self-mythologizing that Overwatch engaged in, one thing is certain: Ana was an incredibly competent soldier, and an even better leader. Under her, deaths were always, always kept to a minimum. Although Fareeha has done her best to live up to that standard, she cannot always claim the same, feels with every death the gulf between the woman her mother was and the woman she herself has become.
She is ashamed, with each death, ashamed that her mother might have done better, and even more ashamed when she thinks of her mother’s rejection, wonders if this was why—if, even after all that she sacrificed, she truly is not cut out for this. Perhaps Ana saw, then, something that she could not.
(It threatened to drown her, the shame, when the others told her that her mother would have been proud of her. She would not have been, was not, would never be, had always made it clear that Fareeha’s life was not the one she would have chosen for her daughter. Her acceptance that this was Fareeha’s life was not pride, was resignation, or so it felt, at least, to Fareeha. She felt she was a failure, in her mother’s mind—perhaps not a failure unto herself, but still, it was true, she was someone Ana failed to protect, and she know it stung, for her mother to think of her, to think of what she had become. How could such a thing ever shift to pride?)
Now that her mother has returned to them, that shame has not melted away. It holds fast to her still, when she looks up from running drills and sees Ana watching her. She runs faster, hopes to sweat it all out, but it clings to her like a stink. Even when she washes, it is not gone from her skin.
She feels smaller, under her mother’s gaze, feels a child again, or a bright-eyed idealist, a young thing with no knowledge of what is to come. It is inadequacy that the frown at the corner of her mother’s mouth in a meeting seems to communicate to her, the idea that her suggestion is not the best one, after all, and why did she bother opening her mouth to speak?
There is the shame, too, of having kept the secret, and she feels that in the reproach with which Reinhardt looks at her, the tightness at the edge of Angela’s eyes. They were hurt, by her mother’s death, were hurting still, in all the time Fareeha spent with them, and she could have told them the truth, could have freed them, if only she had spoken up, had had the courage to defy her mother’s wishes and to say that she was still alive—but she did not. She kept mum.
A stronger woman, she thinks, would have handled it better, a more competent commander. They would have walked the fine line between loyalty to her mother and loyalty to those around her, and found some way to do this without causing pain. They would know what to say, when alone with her mother, too, would be brave, would not run, now, from the challenge of speaking to her, would be strong enough to stand up to her gaze, rather than shrinking from it.
But Fareeha is not that woman. Morning dawns, on the base, again, and her mother finds her in the common kitchen, drinking coffee after her run. The weather is cool, and she has only just come inside, and so her ears burn hot already even before her mother says anything, before she observes, “You’ve been avoiding me.”
I have been, Fareeha wants to say, wants to square her shoulders and make her mother feel every centimeter of her 1.8 meters in height, wants her tone to convey the superiority she does not feel, as if her mother were not worth her time.
But her mother is. Even when she avoids Ana, her world is centered around her, around the way that she feels about that very avoidance. So she does not stand tall, she slouches, like she did as a teenager, rather than straighten up like soldier she has become, and studiously avoids looking at her mother as she grabs her mug and leaves the room.
(Because she does not look, she does not see the way that her mother is slouched over, also, the ways in which their conflict has made her, too, grow smaller.)
Minutes ago, the sweat from her exertions cooled on her body, but it is all she can think of now, the way she likely reeks of it, the feeling of it on her skin. She has to get clean, has to wash it all away. She turns the shower on, too hot, closes her eyes, and breathes.